Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says AI agents need crypto rails, not banks, as Base crosses 100M agentic payments and x402 emerges as key infrastructure.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong pushed back on July 26 against the idea that artificial intelligence is pulling attention away from crypto, arguing instead that AI agents will drive demand for blockchain-based financial services. Armstrong made his case on X, pointing to agentic finance, which he called AiFi, as the next major use case for crypto infrastructure.
"AI being a megatrend takes nothing away from crypto," Armstrong wrote. "If anything, it makes crypto more important." His argument centers on the premise that autonomous AI agents will need programmable money to operate, making traditional banking rails unsuitable for machine-to-machine transactions.
Base, x402 and USDC Form the Core
Coinbase launched Base in 2023 as an Ethereum layer-2 network built to make on-chain applications faster and cheaper. The network was designed as general-purpose blockchain infrastructure, not specifically for AI payments, but has since become the primary platform for agentic transaction activity within Coinbase's ecosystem.
In 2025, Coinbase introduced x402, a payment protocol built on the HTTP "402 Payment Required" standard. It allows AI agents and other autonomous software systems to pay for digital resources such as APIs and data feeds without traditional accounts or manual checkout processes. USD Coin (USDC), the dollar-pegged stablecoin co-launched by Circle and the Coinbase-backed Centre Consortium in 2018, serves as the primary asset for x402 transactions. Together, Base, x402, and USDC form the foundation of Coinbase's current agentic payments infrastructure.
Chainalysis Tracks the Activity Surge
Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis reported in June that agentic payments on Base through x402 surpassed 100 million transactions within roughly nine months of activity. The firm tracked the volume by identifying x402-related payment flows on-chain. Transactions worth at least $1 accounted for 95% of the total value transferred across those payments.
Related Article: Coinbase Launches Agent Payments Stack on 1-Year Business Unit Anniversary
Chainalysis also noted that wallets associated with agentic payments tended to be newer, held a wider range of asset types, and carried smaller balances than typical Base users. Cointelegraph requested updated figures and methodology details from Chainalysis before publication, but the firm had not responded by the time the story was published.
Coinbase is scheduled to report second-quarter earnings on July 31. Analyst consensus tracked by Yahoo Finance puts expected revenue at $1.29 billion, reflecting an estimated 13.8% decline from the same period last year. Earnings per share are expected to come in flat.
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